Insight
Prose and Poetry by Thiago Hirai
-
Second Leter to Ben
Time carries me relentlessly I caught some droplets off its vast stream Held them in my agings hands and made ink.…
Read story → -
Breadth
In the spring of 2015, my manager in London told me he was impressed with my technical breadth. I joined his team after a hackamonth working on a code editor with Kent Beck, went on to work on some low level bluetooth routing, and eventually left that to work on the newsfeed and composer surfaces of the Facebook app, covering three quite distinct surfaces in a few months. That conversation was the first time when I…
Read story → -
Depth
In this piece I discuss the practice of going deep into a system through a few examples. I believe I do this more often and more thoroughly than the average engineer, giving me an edge when tackling problems and increasing my rate of technical learning. Microsoft, 2006 Soon after joining Microsoft as an SDET (a software engineer that writes test automation, a misguided concept IMO but a story for another day) I was…
Read story → -
Snow
If I grow old enough to forget Or sad enough to despair Or mad enough to lose touch Be a good friend and remind me Of that winter time when my kids were young…
Read story → -
1wloc
Joining Facebook in May of 2011 was quite a shock for me. I had come from 6 years at Microsoft, at a time a slow behemoth so big that it could probably ship software faster if it had less engineers. Facebook was not like that. Every 2 weeks Facebook would pool its new hires into a Bootcamp class. Bootcamp was to last for 6 weeks, and it included everybody — new grads, veteran engineers and everyone in between. The…
Read story → -
First Letter to Ben
Everyone will remember this as a dark time But not me History books will talk about viruses, murders, fires, lies But not love, naturally…
Read story → -
Second Letter to Ian
I start with an apology: I’m sorry I didn’t write earlier I took a while because I was afraid that my words wouldn’t be good enough to capture these miracles I’ve seen.…
Read story → -
First Letter to Ian
On the night you came into this world Your mother and I listened together Hand in hand To all our love songs The water broke as the second one played…
Read story →